The World is Backwards
by Francorum Edictis
Summary: He hears an explosion just feet away and wonders if his candle was actually a grenade.
1. The Sanctuary of Dean Winchester

Dean's fingers are twitching madly. There is a lot of smoke in the air and it is hazy as fuck. "How the hell did this fire start?" Dean questions himself out loud but it just sounds like he's speaking inside his own mind. Everything is blurry around the edges and it is almost impossible to see anything in front of him. But he makes out a little pony neighing about five feet ahead.

"What in the world is a Shetland pony doing here," Dean manages to wheeze out because the haze is becoming worse and the fire smells like it is closer than ever before.

Suddenly, BA-ROOOM, a loud noise startles the man into a fighting stance. The pony, equally shocked, sprouts wings and bolts for the next mountain over in the distance, leaving the Winchester alone and extremely confused.

There is a fluttering of noise and suddenly, Castiel is there, looking fuzzy in Dean's distorted vision. The angel is donning large sunglasses and gripping a long, wicked-looking scythe in his hands.

"DEAN," Castiel says gravely, "You must get out of here."

"What in the flipping shithole is going on here? Did _you_ start the fire?" Dean demands immediately, voice unwavering despite the odd sight in front of him. "What the hell is with the shades?"

"DEAN," Castiel booms again in his gruff voice, unruffled in the slightest. "You are not supposed to be here. These glasses help me to see through the Devil Fog. The Devil Fog has you in its unforgiving clutches and you are not seeing things as you should. Are you familiar with Silent Hill?"

"What?" Dean is thoroughly confused. And then, "Where the hell did you go? I can't _see_ you anymore!" Dean shouts as the gloom engulfs the image of his friend and Castiel all but disappears into nothingness. "FUCKING SHIT."

Dean starts walking. He walks and he walks and sometimes it feels like he's going uphill, but he feels like he's just getting nowhere. Then he starts to smell something else.

"Demons," he declares to the fog around him and the scent of sulphur assaults his sensitive nose. "Could do with that damn scythe," he grumbles to the air, hoping Castiel would hear him. No such luck.

The scent of sulphur gets stronger as the haze around him starts to get even thicker. He can barely see his arms stretched out in front of him. "Well this is no good," he muses to himself cheerfully.

Dean rummages through his pockets, hoping to find something in one of them. Bingo. He pulls out a flashlight and turns it on, shines it through the acrid mist.

He sees nothing but more mist. It is silent as the grave all around him. He continues his journey towards... well, onwards at any rate.

A grating squeak emits loudly from his left. He yelps and relinquishes his hold on the flashlight. It clatters off into the unknown with an ominous echo that is all but swallowed up by the shrouding fog.

"H-hello?" Dean tries in what he deems is a manly voice. "Is somebody out there?" He is aware that he sounds just a little bit afraid.

Something rolls along the asphalt and towards his feet. A small item by the looks of it. Dean bends down to examine it just as WOOOSH, a huge poleaxe comes hurtling through the air, slicing where Dean's head has just been moments ago.

Dean is vaguely aware that he is under attack and while his mind screams at him to RUN THE FUCK IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION, he takes a split second to register that the thing on the ground is actually an unlit candle. He scoops it up and makes a run for it.

There is something chasing him. He can feel it. He can feel the rumble of giant feet pounding on the ground, he can hear the fog around him being disturbed. "Fuck, fuck, _fuck_," Dean says to no one in particular and chucks the unlit candle behind him.

He hears an explosion just feet away and wonders if his candle was actually a grenade. That would be ridiculous, he tells himself, and continues to run.

It doesn't sound as if the thing is chasing him anymore and Dean slows to a trot.

A flutter of wings again and suddenly Castiel is all up in his personal space, grabbing him by his collar and yelling into his stunned face. His scythe is no longer with him.

"DEAN," Castiel snarls like a drugged hound, looking immensely terrifying with those dark sunglasses on. "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?"

Dean is completely dazed and bewildered. "What the fuck is going _ON_, Cas?" he spits out viciously and struggles in Castiel's grasp, which is ridiculously strong. "Where the hell am I and why can't you just get us _OUT?_"

"You don't UNDERSTAND," Castiel is looking stern but a little worried at the same time under those jarring sunglasses. "There are things YOU DON'T FULLY COMPREHEND HERE. SO LISTEN TO ME. You can't-"

The ground shifts violently and they both go careening sideways. As soon as Dean hit the ground, Castiel is gone again.

Dean swears dramatically. "Seriously, what is happening here?" he growls out to the fog. "Am I in Stephen King's fucking brain?" The man kicks out in front of him, sending some of the mist swirling about his legs.

Dean hears a steady trickling of water nearby so he takes a cautious step toward the sound. Water, he thinks, suddenly thirsty. Need water.

He comes to a small stream in the middle of an intersection. He notes that there are stoplights that aren't working just overhead. The asphalt stops where the stream begins. There are reeds and lily pads in the flowing water. It is a strange sight.

He all but throws himself into the stream, taking deep gulps as his lips touch the water. He is so, so thirsty.

A frog swims past his head as he's dunking it in. He spots it and picks it up gingerly, looks at it suspiciously. "Where did you come from?" he asks in wonder. "Where did any of this come from?"

The frog's webbed feet make _shlucking_ noises against his wet palm and it hops off his hand quickly, back into the stream. It disappears from Dean's sight, washed away by the fast-moving current.

"Dumb frog," Dean says, then plunges a hand into the water. His fingers curl around something large, soft and fuzzy. He pulls it up and out of the stream.

It is a disembodied limb. The disembodied limb of a Shetland pony.

Dean immediately drops it back into the water and clambers out of the stream in horror.

"DEAN." It is Castiel again, and Dean turns around swiftly and clamps his fingers around the angel's wrist and punches the angel square across the face.

"WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?" Dean demands, gesturing frantically at the stream, at everything in general.

Castiel looks vaguely unimpressed and says, "You are drinking out of the Well of Sorrows. This is the source of all of your tears."

Dean stares at Castiel's scowling face for a moment, as though convinced the angel is completely insane. Then he realises something.

"Your glasses. They didn't..." And Dean yanks Castiel's sunglasses off of his face and shoves them in front of his own eyes. Suddenly, he can see.

He can see. Everything.

"Oh my _God_."


	2. The Dying Days Of Sam Winchester

Sam's eyes adjust almost immediately to the brightness shining all around him. He is convinced the sun has just exploded and the world is currently engulfed in its painfully blinding waves of ultraviolet light. He knows this is not the case, because once he manages to focus on anything, he notices the bridge he is standing on. Wooden slats and fibrous manilla rope and everything.

The bridge is suspended above a deep canyon and is rocking slightly in the wind. It is a precarious and rickety thing, positioned between two uneven cliffs. The ravine below is at least a half mile drop and Sam understands that falling will surely kill him. The flinching brightness around him gets dimmer still, even after his eyes have fully adjusted.

And Sam realises with some amount of horror that the light is fast fading. And it doesn't _stop_ fading. The cacti and sandstone boulders in the distance slowly start to get harder and harder to make out as harsh shadows envelop the land. And Sam is panicking.

In no time at all, he starts to see stars overhead, then they too disappear. And then it is pitch black. And he is still standing stock still on the swaying bridge, the howling wind ruffling his hair.

There is nothing around him but pressing blackness.

"Okay, Jesus. How in the world did I get here?" Sam mutters, mind whirling. He tries to think back to what he was doing previously, before he ended up here. His mind comes up infuriatingly blank, as though someone had plucked all the important memories out of his head. "This is definitely _not_ good."

He shuffles an inch forward, but is a little terrified that he might drop over the edge of the bridge and kill himself. The wind picks up and the bridge rocks from side to side, jostling Sam a little.

A small sound emits from somewhere behind him and the wooden slats creak forebodingly as though something else is on it - a new weight. Sam whips his head around. He sees nothing. Just darkness.

"This doesn't seem like a place you want to be, moose."

The voice _is_ coming from behind him. And the voice is cool, calm and very unmistakably Crowley's.

"Where the hell am I?" Sam demands as he slowly, ever so carefully turns his body around in the pitch black and hopes he is now facing Crowley, or who he thinks is Crowley.

"How the bloody hell would I know?" Crowley's voice comes out of the overwhelming darkness, sour and annoyed. He sounds a mere two feet from where Sam is standing. Sam can't decide if this comforts or distresses him.

The Winchester grits his teeth, his hands unconsciously moving to the waistband of his jeans where he usually tucks his firearm even though he knows it isn't there. "This is not funny, Crowley. How did you do this? Is this some trick?"

Sam gets no response and he throws a fist out. It connects with nothing but air.

Crowley is gone. Or maybe he was never there. Sam doesn't know what to think, so he does the only sensible thing he can come up with and gets on his hands and knees and blindly gropes his way forward, toward the other side of the bridge.

He gets a few inches along before he suddenly notes the loud swooping sound and distinct neighing from somewhere above his head. It sounds like a horse. A horse with wings.

Perhaps it is a pony.

Sam stands up and reaches a hand out toward the sound. His fingers find the haunch of a hairy creature. It screams and grunts and kicks a hoof in Sam's direction. Sam holds onto the horse's leg all the more firmly.

The horse takes off and Sam is pulled along with it while it flies, thrashing madly, through the air.

And then he sees it. Far, _far_ out in the distance. A pale circle of light, probably 10 square miles big by his reckoning, just barely visible. He thinks to himself: _maybe my brother will be there. _And he wills the flying horse to take him towards the smoky light in the distance.

The horse doesn't do that. It doesn't do that _at all_. Instead, it flies in the opposite direction and Sam is left to wonder where this wild creature has decided to take him and how long he will have to hold onto it.


	3. The Hurting of Dean Winchester

Dean blinks his watering eyes. There is a two-headed giraffe in the distance standing on a downed aircraft that has smoke billowing out of it. A few feet away, a kitten is mewling in a bush, its eyes a deep and soulless purple. The bush smells strongly of blood. The kitten has claws curling out of its mouth. There is no fog around him and he notices three moons in the sky of varying sizes and colours - pink, green and orange. Ice is falling from one of them like a waterfall, down towards Earth.

Dean sees all of this and is very concerned.

He rips the glasses off his face, feeling a creeping sense of fear ride up his spine. He looks at Castiel, who is impassively staring at Dean in a way that screams _how much of an idiot can you be? _Dean throws the glasses onto the floor and stomps on them.

The glasses shatter into seven different pieces and Castiel does not flinch.

"Right," Dean says as he squares his shoulders and cricks his neck. "Now, what the hell. I need answers, Fly."

"This is the doing of a very powerful undead being from the depths of Paleo Locust Lair," is Castiel's deadpan reply. "You have been unwittingly sucked into the nightmares of our disrupted future, which ultimately means that the reality of your timeline seventy thousand years henceforth has been brought to the present hour."

Dean squints at the angel, an unimpressed expression on his face. He begins to open his mouth to say something but Castiel silences him with a wave of his hand.

"Dean. Your life is over."

"What does that even _mean_?" Dean grumbles and the floor beneath him quivers a little.

"This is a future Heaven," Castiel says sombrely, his head bowed in reverence to the man in front of him. "You have been here for seventy millennia. I am but a figment of your ideal Heaven. I am not real."

Dean blinks as a strange sort of understanding dawns on him. "Are you saying an almighty undead being brought me into the _future_, but I am actually _dead_ in this future so I have wound up in _Heaven_? And not even _proper_ Heaven but a Heaven that has been twisted by this dude from _insect land_?"

Castiel shrugs. "In layman's terms."

_Oh. _

"_Fuck_."


	4. The Sweet Supper of Sam Winchester

Sam's legs feel numb, so he crouches low in the bushes that he's suddenly found himself in. The leaves smell much like cinnamon and stewed apples. It reminds him of his mother for a moment and that's when he realises he's actually starving.

"I need to find some food," he whispers into the negative silence, combing his fingers through his dirty hair. He hasn't had a proper bath since… God knows when. It feels like he's been stuck in this hellhole for almost a million years.

Something moves in the distance. Sam squints up ahead and spots a diner down the road. Thank God.

He half-jogs, half-lumbers up to the diner. Its signage proclaims 'Sinister Sausage Eatery' but he doesn't dwell too much on what that could even mean. He barges into the squat wooden building and the floors creak like they're about to give way.

It is dark inside. But not so dark that Sam can't make out the dust-covered tables and the cheap plastic chairs and the hulking countertop and the lopsided cash register. He notes the musty smell in here with distaste and resigns himself to vaulting the counter and crossing into the kitchen.

"MY SUPPER IS YOUR SPURTING BLOOD," a seemingly disembodied voice breathes loudly into his ears just as he enters through the swinging doors and Sam immediately throws himself to the ground and barrel rolls to one side, hands scrabbling for his gun.

He has no gun.

"God, fuck." Sam scurries to a standing position and reaches for the nearest object: a rolling pin.

There is a figure by the door. It is a hulking dog the size of a horse, with bleeding eyes and a stump leg.

It growls at him in a semi-human voice. "GET ON YOUR KNEES AND I WILL EAT YOUR HEAD AND YOUR HAIR AND YOUR SHOULDER BLADES TO GIVE ME UNLIMITED STRENGTH."

Sam considers this for a moment before chucking his rolling pin at the growling dog. He legs it to the other side of the kitchen and out through the back door.

The dog does not follow.

Sam is still unbearably hungry.


End file.
